AND THE TOP HONOR GOES TO ...PROVO, UTAH

IN 2020, WHEN SARA "Seung" Blanco Parra was 12, she and her family left their home in Colombia and wound up in Provo, Utah.

- Derek Burnett

It couldn't have been more obvious that they were outsiders. They were immigrants, spoke little English, and practiced Catholicism in a city whose population mostly belongs to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). And yet Blanco Parra, now 16, says she's never felt more safe or welcome.

"In Colombia," she says, "I hardly knew my neighbors. Here, I know I could ask anyone for help, and they would give it to me." During their first few months in Provo when the family had no car, Blanco Parra remembers a motorist pulling over as she was walking to a restaurant with her mother. He gave them a lift, paid for their meal and then hurried off.

This was Provo.

It was the living embodiment of Mormon culture-conservative while curious and open to the world, entrepreneurial while charity-minded, abstemious while fun-loving, ambitious while family-oriented. The city frequently made it onto lists for great places to live, to work, to raise a family, and to play in the outdoors. When one local family was entertaining friends from out of town, the guests looked around and commented, "This place feels like Mayberry."

THERE ARE PLENTY of reasons that this beautiful city of 113,000 likeminded neighbors could've been named the Nicest Place in America. But Provo also struggled with a dark secret. Starting in the late 1990s, young people had begun killing themselves at an alarming rate. What sets the community apart is the blueprint it built to fight this deadly epidemic.

In 1999, a 14-year-old boy walked into Provo High School, the city's second largest school, and handed his watch to his best friend.

"I'm not going to need this after tomorrow," he said. During the school day, he shared his plans with six other friends, then went home and killed himself. He wasn't the first.